There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Because beauty isn't enough, there must be something more.

Oh! this opponent, this collaborator against your will, whose notion of beauty always differs from yours and whose means are often too limited for active assistance to your intentions!

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

The double hundred Fowler hit in the Madras Test was an absolute beauty.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

I had a lot of resentment for a while toward Kim Novak. But I don't mind her anymore. She's okay. We've become friends. I even asked her before this trip for some beauty tips.

You don't know what the Chinese expect in the way of beauty. The presentation is just a farce. You come into a room filled with 50 people and they don't talk to you. There's very little interaction.

Then Christ shall be clothed with all the beauty of the elect as if with a long tunic variously adorned, in which He shall shine as if covered with all manner of precious stones.

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can!

In things to be seen at once, much variety makes confusion, another vice of beauty. In things that are not seen at once, and have no respect one to another, great variety is commendable, provided this variety transgress not the rules of optics and geometry.

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.

The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation.

Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.

I think love and beauty are what life is all about.

If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.